The Way of a Pilgrim

The Way of a Pilgrim, or The Pilgrim's Tale (Russian: «Откровенные рассказы странника духовному своему отцу»), is the English title of a 19th-century Russian work, recounting the narrator's journey as a mendicant pilgrim across Russia while practicing the Jesus Prayer. It is unknown if the book is literally an account of a single pilgrim, or if it uses a fictional pilgrim's journey as a vehicle to teach the practice of ceaseless inner prayer and communion with God. The Russian original, or a copy of it, was present at a Mount Athos monastery in Greece in the 19th century, and was first published in Kazan in 1884, under the Russian title that translates as "Candid Narratives of a Pilgrim to His Spiritual Father."

Critical scholarship has investigated the authorship of the four original and three supplementary tales. Aleksei Pentkovsky has argued that the first four tales survive in the form of a later redaction of an original work by Archimandrite Mikhail Kozlov (1826–1884), The Seeker of Unceasing Prayer, and that the supplementary tales are the work of Arsenii Troepolskii (1804–1870). Both of these men spent time as wanderers.

The pilgrim's inner journey begins when he is struck upon hearing the words of Paul (in I Thessalonians 5:17) to "pray without ceasing." He visits churches and monasteries to try and understand how to pray without ceasing. His travels lead him to a starets (a spiritual father) who teaches him the Jesus Prayer—"Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me"—and gives him practical advice on how to recite the prayer uninterruptedly, as a type of mantra.

The book details the gradual spiritual development and struggles of the narrator, and the effect the narrator's spirituality has on those around him. The sequel is entitled The Pilgrim Continues his Way. Translations of both documents were published together in some English editions.

The most widely used English edition was translated by Reginald Michael (R. M.) French (b. 1884), and first published in 1931. In his Translator's Note, French wrote of the pilgrim that "everyone will appreciate the sincerity of his conviction and few probably will doubt the reality of his experience." French wrote that the events described in the book "appear to belong to a Russia prior to the liberation of the serfs [in] 1861." French also observed that the Pilgrim's narrative mentions the Crimean War, which began in 1853. Therefore, it was "between those two dates," 1853 and 1861, that the Pilgrim arrived at Irkutsk and found a spiritual father, two of the major events in the Pilgrim's narrative.

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